Back Issues: "The X-Files/30 Days of Night (2010)"

Horror doesn't have the greatest record when it comes to movie crossovers. Freddy vs Jason was a bit of a mess and Alien vs Predator was... Unfortunate. But when it comes to comics, things aren't so bad! The Goon featuring Hellboy, Hack/Slash vs Chucky and Army of Darkness vs Reanimator were all really cool comics. Horror crossovers work pretty well in comics!

But one of the best crossovers is The X-Files/30 Days of Night mini series by Steve Niles and Adam Jones, with art by Tom Mandrake.

Cover by Andrea Sorrentino.
Click to enlarge

30 Days of Night is one of the best horror comics around, managing to make vampires interesting and creepy! And The X-Files is The X-Files. I don't need to explain The X-Files to you.

The book is set in Wainwright, Alaska two weeks into a month without sunshine. 30 Days of night, you might say.

Local resident Henry-Lee “Patches” Brown takes a wrong turn and comes across a field of abandoned trucks with their owners decapitated, drained of blood and left stuck to a pole, with the heads at their feet.

Agent Fox Mulder and his long suffering partner Agent Dana Scully pack their bags and head straight to Wainwright, since this is exactly their sort of thing.

While investigating the truck graveyard, they find a young girl buried in the snow. When Scully digs her up, she bursts into flames, which isn't something people normally do. They rush her to the nearest hospital and things get progressively worse from there with plenty of dead bodies flying around.

It gets off to a nice, easy start with no real action for quite a while. Instead, it feels more like an episode of The X-Files than you might expect, with the horror elements scattered around. The first part of the book puts more focus on the investigation and slowly builds to the more fast paced scenes.

Steve Niles and Adam Jones do a great job of recreating the feel of the TV show, but still keep the horror, gore and creepiness that helped make 30 Days of Night such an excellent series. Unlike some crossovers, neither property is competing with the other for space; they both work perfectly together. We get the slower, investigation focused elements from the X-Files TV series, which leads into lots of gore and action that feels more like 30 Days of Night. It's the best of both!

Tom Mandrake's art style is perfectly suited to this kind of book, with a nice, dark horrific vibe that helps build the atmosphere. And he also does a fantastic David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson!

Many comics like this feature characters that look nothing like their live action counter parts, mostly thanks to the lack of likeness rights, more so than inferior art. But that clearly wasn't an issue here, since both Mulder and Scully look spot on and instantly recognsisable.

If you're looking for some fun filled horror to start the Halloween month off right, this is the place to start! It's a genuinely well written book full of murder, mayhem and Mulder jokes. And, luckily, IDW are re-releasing it as a nice new Hardcover this week!!!

Have you read the book? Planning to pick up the excellent hardcover version? Let us know below!